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Last Poems by A.E. Housman
Last Poems (1922) is the second and last of the two volumes of poems A.E. Housman published during his lifetime - the first, and better-known, being A Shropshire Lad (1896). Housman was an emotionally withdrawn man whose closest friend Moses Jackson had been his roommate when he was at Oxford in 1877-1882. In the 1920s, when Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman selected forty-one previously unpublished poems into a volume entitled Last Poems, for him to read. The introduction to the volume explains his rationale: I publish these poems, few though they are, because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my first book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came; and it is best that what I have written should be printed while I am here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation. About a quarter of this matter belongs to the April of the present year, but most of it to dates between 1895 and 1910. :September 1922. Among these poems, Number XXXVII, EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES is perhaps the best-known: :These, in the day when heaven was falling, : The hour when earth’s foundations fled, :Followed their mercenary calling : And took their wages and are dead. :Their shoulders held the sky suspended; : They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; :What God abandoned, these defended, : And saved the sum of things for pay. The 41 poems in this volume are listed below. Where a poem is untitled, the first line is given in italics: :I THE WEST :II (As I gird on for fighting) :III (Her strong enchantments failing) :IV ILLIC JACET :V GRENADIER :VI LANCER :VII (In valleys green and still) :VIII (Soldier from the wars returning) :IX (The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers) :X (Could man be drunk for ever) :XI (Yonder see the morning blink) :XII ('' The laws of God, the laws of man'') :XIII THE DESERTER :XIV THE CULPRIT :XV EIGHT O’CLOCK :XVI SPRING MORNING :XVII ASTRONOMY :XVIII (The rain, it streams on stone and hillock) :XIX (In midnights of November) :XX (The night is freezing fast) :XXI (The fairies break their dances) :XXII (The sloe was lost in flower) :XXIII (In the morning, in the morning) :XXIV EPITHALAMIUM :XXV THE ORACLES :XXVI (The half-moon westers low, my love) :XXVII (The sigh that heaves the grasses) :XXVIII (Now dreary dawns the eastern light) :XXIX (Wake not for the world-heard thunder) :XXX SINNER’S RUE :XXXI HELL’S GATE :XXXII (When I would muse in boyhood) :XXXIII (When the eye of day is shut) :XXXIV THE FIRST OF MAY :XXXV (When first my way to fair I took) :XXXVI REVOLUTION :XXXVII EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES :XXXVIII (Oh stay at home, my lad, and plough) :XXXIX (When summer’s end is nighing) :XL (Tell me not here, it needs not saying) :XLI FANCY’S KNELL External links *''Last Poems'' from Project Gutenberg Category:1922 books Category:poetry collections Category:British poems